Kids are just really good at learning quickly. That’s all it is, really. Chess is all about study and learning, so kids are very adept at getting good quickly. Obviously there are some who are prodigies, but that’s pretty exceptionally rare.

Adult learners also can get good quickly, but it requires a lot of meta-cognitive thinking (thinking about how you think, or “learning to learn”), time, and discipline. The guy that runs my local chess club is probably in his 60s, and he told me that he was sitting around ~1100 for a long time until recently he started studying, where he rapidly jumped up to ~1600 after, as he put it, “things clicked”.

It’s never too late to rapidly improve your own abilities, which is what I really love about the game, because I find it teaches you to apply that mindset to all aspects of life.